http://gingermiss.wordpress.com/

Blogging While Female

I just wanted to highlight the abuse that this woman has received for having the nerve to defend abused women, condemn pornography, and offer women a space where they can speak freely without fear of retribution.

I can’t think of a better way to give credence to the arguments of radical feminists.

EDIT: It makes me incredibly sad that this is one of the top posts on WordPress.

I read an article that really irritated me regarding the concept of the ‘emotional affair’, i.e. cheating on your spouse in the form of emotional support from another. The whole idea of the emotional affair is exploited to make women feel guilty about having profound personal relationships outside of their marriage.

I’m not saying that forming emotional connections to someone else can’t be hurtful to your spouse or evolve into something that becomes a full fledged physical affair, but I loathe this idea that a married woman has to cut herself off from the world; that every moment of satisfaction and fulfillment she receives should be through her husband and her husband alone; that having a valuable friend outside of her husband is something she should feel guilty about.

Oh society, with your mixed messages and lose-lose ultimatums - you really have it out for girls, don’t you?

Just wanted to post to say Sexuality In Art is back. If you haven’t been there, you should undoubtedly give it a look. It’s an excellent, thought-provoking, beautiful blog. I haven’t gotten the chance to look at much of the new stuff yet but I fully intend to.

The recent post on Abstinence Posters is worth a look alone. Fascinating, truly fascinating. I’ve got a lot to say about a poster that says “You can’t be unwrapped twice”, but not right now.

I stumbled across an article on MSN today titled, “‘Momblocked’ mothers edged out by dads”.

Wait - what?

Am I insane, or is that a very strange and deliberate play on words within the title -’momblocked’ instead of ‘cockblocked’? Cockblocked, of course, being the phrase that men use when their predatory attempts to coerce a woman into sex fail due to some unforeseen barrier. Was this their sad and disconcerting way of trying to attract men’s attention?

Journalistic sexism rears its ugly and perplexing head once again.

Laurelin in the Rain has posted the 39th Carnival of Feminists, and there’s definitely some interesting reads in there. Just wanted to mention it. Tra la la.

If you hate doing it as much as I do, you’ve probably wondered the same thing yourself. It’s fucking stupid. I only do it when suckered into it or when feeling particularly insecure. The information below is interesting. Enjoy.

From The Straight Dope:

I knew if I procrastinated long enough on this often-asked question somebody would eventually do the legwork for me. Sure enough, Pete Cook of Chicago has sent me a 1982 article from the Journal of American Culture by Christine Hope bearing the grand title “Caucasian Female Body Hair and American Culture.”

The gist of the article is that U.S. women were browbeaten into shaving underarm hair by a sustained marketing assault that began in 1915. (Leg hair came later.)

The aim of what Hope calls the Great Underarm Campaign was to inform American womanhood of a problem that till then it didn’t know it had, namely unsightly underarm hair.

For the remainder of the piece, which I assure you is very interesting, click the link above.

… and here’s a fun site to browse, if the mood strikes you:

Beauty and Hygiene Advertisements from the 1920’s to the 1950’s

I was initially disturbed by Cindy Sheehan’s recent ‘desertion’ of the protest movement she developed. The pull-quote that most articles and stories focused on was the statement Cindy made about coming to the realization that her son died for nothing. The idea that she would believe that is understandably saddening and bothersome. However, upon actually examining the essay she wrote that has caused so much upheaval, I can see that her feelings have been well expressed.

Cindy Sheehan became a polarizing political figure who was exploited and openly abused by both the Republican and Democratic parties. She uses a lot of her essay to criticize the two-party system, and everything she says is correct. Limitless, unchallenged political party devotion is destroying American government. It’s destroying America. Do not listen to the people who laugh off any non-mainstream political candidate because “they’ll never get elected”. They’ll never get elected because you’ll never elect them.

Her words are generally heartbreaking, although the melodrama of certain lines did make me roll my eyes. Those periodic groans didn’t manage to detract from the essay’s overall power and significance. Cindy has come to the realization that even if she sacrifices everything she’ll never be able to change the system. That’s awful.

The most devastating conclusion that I reached this morning, however, was that Casey did indeed die for nothing. His precious lifeblood drained out in a country far away from his family who loves him, killed by his own country which is beholden to and run by a war machine that even controls what we think. I have tried every since he died to make his sacrifice meaningful. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. It is so painful to me to know that I bought into this system for so many years and Casey paid the price for that allegiance. I failed my boy and that hurts the most.

I was struck by the idea that Sheehan blames herself for Casey’s death, despite the fact that she is so adamantly averse to the war. She blames her own faith in the system. That’s a pretty dark place to come to. Quite a lot to take on yourself. She must feel desperately defeated and depressed right now.

So the issue I’ve been wondering about is whether or not her son did truly die for nothing. I don’t believe he did. People know Casey’s name, his sacrifice, and they know his mother’s overwhelming, unquenchable grief. If anything, Casey’s death meant something to the anti-war movement as a whole because of the effect it had on his family and the way his mother was then able to make people think once again about what their country was doing beyond their own walls.

Fatigue seems to be the worst enemy of the anti-war movement because the entire process is such a grueling uphill climb. It’s a common enemy of any protest movement. How many people can comprehend the scope of all the death caused by this war, on both sides of the fence? How many people can hold on to that outrage and for how long, without perceiving any progress or response to their anguished cries? I doubt many people will even let those feelings in to begin with unless personally affected by them. “You can’t heal the world,” has become the protective mantra of every apolitico in the country.

I’m sorry that Cindy Sheehan felt that her efforts were worthless. They weren’t, and they won’t be. I’m sorry and angry that I feel impotent in the face of my own government’s actions. I’m sorry that she feels her son died for nothing. I doubt she’ll ever feel very different and I cannot blame her for that.

P.S. - Genuinely referring to Cindy Sheehan as an “attention whore” would indicate a high probability that you’re an idiot.

If you’re an undergraduate turned stripper.

Academic Stripping? Student Strips For Thesis
Professor Applauds Student’s Courage

OMAHA, Neb. — A University of Nebraska-Omaha student took a job recently as a stripper for class credit.

Jenny Heineman, a sociology student, said she wanted to bring sex workers out of the dark, so she felt she had to enter their world. Her thesis, “Gender and Work: An Ethnography of a Midwest Strip Club,” got her a B and she graduated this spring with high honors.

I would really like to see what her analysis was. I’m going to look through her thesis. Was she really doing critical, meaningful work? Are her assertions really that groundbreaking? Because other women have done this already; it’s not exactly a novel, innovative concept. What’s the nature of her “fascination” with the world of sex work?

The most striking part of the whole story to me was that she received a B. That’s right. Her professor praised her courage. Just not enough to give her an outstanding grade, I guess. She would have needed to prostitute herself for that.

In a perplexing and unsettling occurrence, Amy Fisher has apparently reentered some sort of relationship with Joey Buttafuoco.

What.

The.

Hell.

KGET TV Blurb About The New ‘Relationship’ Between Amy Fisher and Joey Buttafuoco

I remember watching Amy Fisher’s interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show earlier this year. I was never overly interested in the Amy Fisher case, partially because it turned into such a disgusting reflection of American society. I was younger when it happened. Too young to really understand it’s significance; too young to understand what all the sexism, cruelty, and exploitation meant; too young to feel the sick, vulnerable feeling in my stomach that I now associate with the term “Long Island Lolita”.

Amy Fisher was a child when all of this happened. She was sixteen years old. She couldn’t drink. She couldn’t vote. She wasn’t even a senior in high school. Joey Buttafuoco was (and is) a repellent sub-human bottom feeder whose pedophilia was treated more like a gaff than a crime.

Amy Fisher did something horrible. She shot Mary Jo Buttafuoco in the face, but she only fired the gun. Joey “Stereotype of Sleaze” Buttafuoco created the entire situation. He initiated a sexual relationship with an underage girl. He turned said girl into a prostitute. He created the illicit double life that his wife ended up being punished for. He decimated the lives of two women in one fell swoop.

So then why in God’s name would Amy Fisher voluntarily enter a romantic relationship, or any form of a relationship, with the man who willingly raped and pimped her? Because he raped and pimped her, it would seem. Her Oprah interview was fascinating, insightful, and tragic. The current Amy Fisher seemed like an abused, psychologically damaged woman who was trying to figure out what kind of a life she was supposed to have; grasping at straws to see if anything would make her happy.

The news of this floored me at first. Not in a surprised way, but in a, “Why would whatever cosmic force governs the universe let that be true?” way. It makes me nauseous. This whole rumored tv show situation further illustrates how evil reality television as a genre generally is - not because it’s intrinsically evil, but because television executives exploit it to pursue all their wildest idiotic programming dreams.

The following excerpt is from Oprah’s website, summarizing the interview with Amy. I wanted to focus on the transcript in detail, but it doesn’t seem to be anywhere online. The confusion this whole situation has wrought is pretty well reflected in the quote below though.

When it comes to talking to her children about her past, Amy feels she’ll be able to be honest. “No parent ever wants to think their child could view them as a bad person. When the time comes and my son asks me about my past, I’m going to be honest with him. All I can do is explain to him that everybody has a past and all we can do is learn from our mistakes and be a better person. We’ve all done things we’re not proud of, but that doesn’t define who we are.”

What have you learned, Amy?

Want to see something disturbing?

I always thought that was a wonderfully strange question.

That observation not withstanding, you’ll probably want to see this.

Fetch Me My Axe
“Read This” - The post is regarding the coverage of the police brutality caught on film during the May Day Pro-Immigration Rally in Los Angeles. I’m not well acquainted with all the associated blog controversy, but it doesn’t seem like you have to be to get the gist of what’s going on.

I hadn’t seen the videos. I may be behind the times, but I wanted to respond to it anyway.

Terrifying is the best word to describe it. As I began watching the first video, not really knowing what it was I was seeing, I was passively paying attention to it until the officer pushed the reporter. Then I knew that something really sinister was going on. The protective line, however fragile and tentative, formed by the presence of the media was actively being destroyed. It wasn’t just reporters doing reporting. It wasn’t just cops acting out of control. It was a conscious, straight-forward decimation of the laws and basic principles that once governed America.

Why is this happening? How is this happening? What can be done to stop it? Regardless of how you feel about immigration or pro-immigration politics, that video should frighten you. Americans should be embarrassed, appalled, and outraged.

The new regime is taking our country away from us. Why are we letting them?